There was a long pause while the mockingbird sang with an exuberant magic which might baffle the emulation of any ada-wehi of them all.  MacVintie had almost forgotten the episode when Attusah said suddenly that the colonists translated the name of Atta-Kulla-Kulla as the “Little Carpenter.”

“Hegh! they hae a ship named for his honor!” exclaimed the Highlander.  “I hae seen the Little Carpenter in the harbor in Charlestoun, swingin’ an’ bobbin’ at her cables, just out frae the mither country!  Her captain’s name wull be Maitland.”

This evidence of the importance of the Cherokee magnate in the opinion of the British colonists did not please the ada-wehi.  He spat upon the ship with ostentatious contempt as it were, and then went on silently with his carving.

The mockingbird paused to listen to a note from the hermit thrush in the dense rhododendron, still splendidly abloom on the mountain slope.  The Scotchman’s eyes narrowed to distinguish if the white flake of light in the deep green water across a little bay were the reflection of the flower known as the Chilhowee lily, or the ethereal blossom itself.

Attusah’s mind seemed yet with the seagoing craft.  He himself knew the name of another ship, he said presently; and the Highlander fancied that he ill liked to be outdone in knowledge of the outer world.

But it was immediately developed that in this ship Atta-Kulla-Kulla had sailed to England many years before to visit King George II. in London.[8] Attusah could not at once anglicize the name “Chochoola,” but after so long a time MacVintie was enabled to identify the Fox, then a noted British man-of-war.

In these leisurely beguilements the days passed, until one morning Attusah’s fears and presentiments were realized in their seizure by a party of Cherokees, who swooped down upon their hermitage and bore them off by force to the council-house of the town of Citico, where Atta-Kulla-Kulla and a number of other head men had assembled to discuss the critical affairs of the tribe, and decide on its future policy.

So critical indeed was the situation that it seemed to MacVintie that they might well dispense with notice of two factors so inconsiderable in the scale of national importance as the ada-wehi and his captive.  But one was a British prisoner, calculated to expiate in a degree with his life the woe and ruin his comrades had wrought.  The more essential was this course since the triumph of putting him to the torture and death would gratify and reanimate many whose zeal was flagging under an accumulation of anguish and helpless defeat, and stimulate them to renewed exertions.  For before the Cherokees would sue for peace they waited long in the hope that the French would yet be enabled to convey to them a sufficient supply of powder to renew and prosecute the war.